November 23, 2010

Interesting clip, but I note that there are 5 commentators, and 3 sit silently while 2 do all the talking. The 3 are all men. The 2 are women. I'm picking up a real female-against-female vibe in this clip. It's not just what the women say and how they say it, it's the way the men sit back and maintain steely silence.

Urban strivers of the female persuasion hate Sarah with a purple passion. They're going to wake up on November 3rd or 4th 2012 wondering what happened because like Pauline Kael, "Nobody I know voted for him." The him was Nixon, this time it will be her.

A couple years ago, no one seemed to be so interested in the shows on the Discovery Channel. Palin has gotten it a ton of buzz. Not as much, of course, as Al Gore generated for that channel he started! What was that called? Douchenozzle TV?

Perhaps the men read the Fox memo that it is not PC to knock Palin and the women didn't? Or perhaps they knew they could be honest off air, but not on? At any rate the public has already left Palin's Alaska in droves--%40 loss of audience.

Well. Interesting. As noted above, Judith Miller is a former NY Times columnist--she dished the most. Liz Trotta was pretty restrained--as I recall she wrote a book on catty women and media bias--maybe she decided she ought to shut up.

I remember that Sound of Music quote from the NY Times reporter--I blogged about it. How can romance be missing, Climbing every mountain with Todd:)

Yeah and the nuns used to say "empty cans make the most noise". We need a candidate who can answer every type of question briefly and succinctly. I like Palin a lot but when she speaks she is always circling back to that real American bit. She needs to focus more on the relatively impersonal Beltway vs. outside the beltway disconnect.

And she should keep quiet once in a while. Don't become a Santorum and butt into every stinking issue under the sun. Afterall, the nuns also said "don't speak unless you are spoken to".

You know, the more Sarah Palin becomes a lightning rod for the Left, the more I like her. I really dig her essays promoting low taxes and limited government, her running around the country supporting Tea Party candidates and so forth.

But you know, though I like her, and love the effect she has on the self absorbed Left, I really, really don't want her to be President. The things she's doing, they're great, but they aren't the groundwork for leader of the Free World, at least in my estimation.

We need a candidate who can answer every type of question briefly and succinctly.

Actually, we don't need a candidate or president who thinks he/she knows the answer to every question or even needs to. Obama thinks he's the smartest person in any room and look at the job he's doing on the country.

Remember the "gotcha" questions that the Press loves to ask of Republicans such as who is the Deputy Asssistant Undersecretary of Somesuch in the Republic of Carjackistan? First, they never ask such questions of Democrats, and second, that's the kind of question that any reasonable executive should answer with "If the need arises, my staff will look it up."

As for those women tearing into Palin, some people never matured pass the "Middle School Bitch" phase.

I don't get it but I admit I'm not of the proper persuasion - I'm a kind of conservative guy. What is the reason these women are hating on Palin? Are they jealous (of her beauty or family or fame)? Do they think she's stupid? Is it about abortion?

I should have said "pertinent" question. I think it would be refreshing if a pol ever said "i don't know the answer" to a question. Or I'd love to see a pol tell a reporter to screw off when they ask a dumb question.

Look, even at Fox, other than her slavish worshipper Hannity, eyes roll on occasion on Palins constant folksy "real American" jabber on each and every current topic under the sun.Most restrain it..the two ladies did not.

Quite similar to how Democrats used to roll their eyes at Jesse Jacksons inability to refrain from wading in on each and every "matter" that came to his attention...and his constant Preacher-speak, alliterative jabber.

It got old with Jesse, it will get old with Palin. Jesse had about a 8 year run before even the Democrats said "enough with you and your endless attention craving and buttinsky self-promotion"! But the news cycle is far shorter now, attention spans reduced.

Ms Trotta (in green), who did yeoman work as a field (and I do mean field, as in getting shot at) correspondent in 'Nam for Black Rock, is seen mostly on the weekends as a media critic on Fox's Sunday show; during the week, she has a real job. She got in trouble during the '08 campaign for a statement that the Obama people wanted to construe as her hoping he got shot.

Salamandyr said...You know, the more Sarah Palin becomes a lightning rod for the Left, the more I like her=============It's the same phenomenon Garage astutely(!!!) observed happened with Noble Algore. Credit Garage for being right rarely, but when he is right, he is pretty good.

The more people said Gore was an idiot - the more Greens, liberals, and progressive Jews flocked to Noble Algore. Their worship of him intensified in face of "persecution" of the Oracle of Planet-Saving. The more the non-believers in Algore said he was wrong, the more convinced his followers became that in itself made Algore even more correct and worthy of further worshipping.

I don't watch any cable news, outside election night returns. I used to watch some Fox years and years ago. My wife broke water on the couch watching Bill O'Reilly. Swear to God.

Fox is very careful what liberals they do let appear on their network though. The regulars are all good Fox Democrats like Pat Caddell, who aren't even really Democrats. Last time I watched Fox was on vacation out West a month ago or so, where every TV in the hotels were tuned to Fox. It's 100% pure propaganda - like Gateway Pundit in video form.

Fox used to regularly have as a guest some black dude named "Niger Innes". His opinionating was resoundingly unremarkable and as blandly conventional as unseasoned cream of wheat, which made it all the more obvious that he was only there so they could print "Niger" across the bottom of the screen when he was speaking. It spoke to a lack of seriousness and pandering to a stereotyped base that I thought was pretty lame.

Note that this was on the H&C and OReilly shows, which were (and probably still are) markedly different than the Brit Hume newshour, which was the best and least-biased hard news show on television.

Those opinion shows, be they on Fox or anywhere else, are frustratingly banal, dumb as doornails, and astoundingly formulaic (OReilly's is the worst for formula sequencing); I don't know how anyone can watch them more than a week or two before figuring them out and recoiling with ennui if not disgust.

He is the president of the Congress of Racial Equality and has been a figure in New York City politics for the past twenty years. He is a fairly conservative african american and a reliable talking head in the vein of Bill Donahue of the Catholic League who he is very analgous to in his act.

I don't think his name has anything to do with it. But hey knock yourself out if it makes you feel better.

Fox used to regularly have as a guest some black dude named "Niger Innes".

Fox used to regularly have the New Black Panthers on (I just googled, it was 50 times) when they wanted the perspective of a black person. Complete with the bodyguard wearing a beret standing behind Malik Shabazz or Quanell X.

I watched the clip, and it was mostly that one lady. I thought her saying that Palin hated the outdoors and probably just wanted to get back to her cell phone was major projection. She was just gleeful at getting to rant about Palin. And she did eventually realize she was laughing alone and sounding like a crazy person. Sad, really.

I really, really don't want her to be President

I definitely don’t think she’s ready. Her resume is too thin and she needs polish. (from a pure strategy point, her negatives are rather high). Could she come back one day after holding another type of elected office and really boning up on policy? Maybe. I’ll be happy to re-evaluate in 8 years or so. It just doesn’t seem right, right now though.

** “eat” is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense, “ate”?

** if you rearrange the letters in “Tea Party Republicans,” and add just a few more letters, it spells: “F**k you, you free-loading, mean-spirited, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, global warming-denying, tax-evading, Wall Street suck-ups, phony religious hypocrites, lying cheaters and cheating liars, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our new president is intelligent, thoughtful, and a well educated leader and is trying to clean up the mess you created, so go f**k yourselves.”

Isn’t that interesting?

Liberal Humor. They can't help it, what with knowing everyone else's motivations and all.

And what's up with people getting all bugly eyed about the word, "Niger." The word has no etymological relationship to the "N-word" (Oh, how I hate having to use that! But Althouse makes the rules, and I'm not gonna push it...). Niger's etymological roots are completely African, and refer both to a river and a country (Nigeria.).

That an African-American child would be named "Niger" is, to me, quite sensible and honorable of one with West African heritage.

"The regulars are all good Fox Democrats like Pat Caddell, who aren't even really Democrats."

Nonsense. Caddell is an outlier. There are plenty of moonbats on Fox. Too many. Folks that would have you nodding in approval like a bobblehead. I have to change the channel when they come on.

What I want is a real right wing news channel...no lefties need apply. I don't need to hear their arguments. I've heard them ad nauseum my entire life. More importantly I've seen the wreckage in their wake on both a societal and personal level.

I want to watch people like Tom Sowell and Richard Epstein, not Bill O'Reilly or Mike Huckabee.

More importantly I've seen the wreckage in their wake on both a societal and personal level.

And yet you (and Althouse) still choose to live in liberal enclaves. And complain about it of course.

Why not.....just move? Christ I live 2 miles outside Madison and I don't interact with one single liberal. My friends always rag about "liberals in Madison", and I ask them "why not move?", and they say "No, I love it here". So it goes.

Christ I live 2 miles outside Madison and I don't interact with one single liberal. My friends always rag about "liberals in Madison", and I ask them "why not move?", and they say "No, I love it here". So it goes.

When you make this stuff up does it come naturally or do you have to work at it? I mean the whole 'I don't interact with a single liberal' is really funny. I mean almost laugh out loud.

I do think they don't go after Hillary as hungrily. And no offense intended, and I am very broadly generalizing, but I think it's because Hillary is sexually non-threatening and unattractive. I think that's the same reason women claim Michelle Obama is so beautiful. Heads up-- she's just not. And I cast a very wide net on women, I like every kind out there, as long as they periodically smile.

There are several reasons. Mostly I need a big urban area to support my career, and the Bay Area is one of the best for working musicians.

NYC is insanely competitive with surprisingly little work given its size. I know great players there who struggle terribly and must resort to other means of earning a living, and that is always at the expense of time needed to keep developing as an artist.

LA is worse. Very little live action and the studio work is sewn up amongst an exclusive clique.

Plus they are almost as liberal as the Bay Area, though SF and Berkeley have the most extreme loony leftists anywhere for sure.

Also I am an outdoors enthusiast. I can be on deserted mountain bike trails in 20 minutes of pedaling from my door and at the west anchorage of the Bay Bridge in 35 minutes by car. Hard to beat that.

And then there's the weather. Nuff said.

There are more conservatives here than you might think, especially in my neck of the woods. However being a musician simply guarantees I'm surrounded by an endless supply of liberals who know absolutely nothing about political philosophy or basic economics. I don't talk politics with them and just play music and keep it light and humorous in conversation.

My real concern about leftism is for the sake of the nation, civilization, and the world. My personal beef with liberal douchebags is inconsequential.

Beautiful, successful, happily married, calm in the face of family drama, fertile, strong physically and emotionally, personally accomplished, happy and cheerful, confident - a few of Gov. Palin's strengths. These other gals? Not so much. Jealousy, especially when it undermines one's own brittle self image is not pretty when given vent. It becomes fear. If Mrs. Palin shifts the paradigm of the model female what happens to women like these two?

A admire Palin, but I can't imagine actually watching the series. There are two reasons (in my mind) to watch a reality show; for the train wrecks or to learn things I did not know.

Since I don't particularly care for train wreck TV (and don't believe TLC would serve it up even if it happened), and I wouldn't expect to actually learn anything I hadn't already seen on any number of nature shows, then the only other reason to watch would be idolatry, which is how we got into our current mess.

Oh they're Democrats. They're like Democrats used to be...before the termi..I mean progressives took the party over.

"I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective: a graduated inheritance tax increasing rapidly with the size of the estate.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Every dollar spent by the government must be paid for either by taxes or by more borrowing with greater debt. The only way to make more tax cuts now is to have bigger and bigger deficits and to borrow more and more money. Either we or our children will have to bear the burden of this debt. This is one kind of chicken that always comes home to roost. An unwise tax cutter, my fellow citizens, is no real friend of the taxpayer."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

It's a shame the punditocracy has seen so much to profit from in polarizing everyone into fake little tribes. It might as well all be for show. Well, on teevee it is...

"Fox used to regularly have the New Black Panthers on (I just googled, it was 50 times) when they wanted the perspective of a black person."

Garage Mahal assumes if you are putting a NBP on, it must be to get the entire black community's POV.

Why? Because he's an idiot. No evidence is provided to justify this pathetic complaint. FNC has a lot of blacks on, such as Juan Williams. They don't seem to really care if someone's black or white, but rather if they present a diversity of ideas.

The fact is that no matter how much I agree with her, and it certainly depends of the issue, she always comes off sounding like a hick and I don't want a woman who sounds like a hick to be my president and I bet most Americans don't, either.

I had been hoping that she would be attempting to smooth out her delivery but alas! it's not to be.

p.s. I really, REALLY don't want her to be elected President and the continue to read about how 'stupid/dumb/ she sounds.

Liz Trotta and Judith Miller? Oh please! This is not the first time on Fox that Trotta has gone negative on Palin. Judith Miller is a liberal Fox contributor. A former NYTer. An Obama voter. No surprise from any of these womyn.

I think that the "out of context" defense may work well enough there. The one lady laughing so hard seemed mostly to be talking about the criticisms other people were making that were so funny. I'm not sure if it was her opinion that Palin secretly wanted to get out of the big outdoors or if she was saying someone else said that, and then when she started to explain that what a person thought of it had most to do with if they liked the person to start with, she got cut off. Her very next statement may have been that she didn't have those negative reactions to the show.

un, the only way you won't hear someone saying Palin sounds dumb is if she woke up one morning and proclaimed she's a liberal Democrat. When that happens, aw shucks, gee willikers, why, she'd be just the brightest gosh-danged womyn who ever came down the pike, I do declare!

His thesis is that a conservative woman can't win a national election, because the majority of women won't vote for her. It's pretty bleak, but I think he's onto something. He mainly seems to be referring to urban women, but there are enough of them to affect the outcome of an election.

un, the only way you won't hear someone saying Palin sounds dumb is if she woke up one morning and proclaimed she's a liberal Democrat. When that happens, aw shucks, gee willikers, why, she'd be just the brightest gosh-danged womyn who ever came down the pike, I do declare!___

Isn't it pretty to think so?

But no.

Palin quit her job. That is but one reason this Democrat would never consider voting for her if she were ever to become a member of the Democratic Party.

Chase said... Who can ever figure out what the left finds funny? I'm not sure too many on the left have a sense of humor. Unless degrading somebody else is funny. Elsewhere it was noted that in the massive collection of emails from the East Anglia University, the lack of humor. No puns, no inside jokes, nothing. A lot of what passes for humor these days is merely ripping on somebody. Obama thought he was being funny when he compared his bowling skills to a Special Olympics participant.

My hope is that Palin doesn't run for President, because she is freer to call people out for their inanities not being President. My guess is that Sarah, with her children and positive love of life put these other women to shame. I remember years ago that offices with large numbers of female employees ran smoother with a male supervisor. Women with other women tended to grate on each other in ways that men with men don't. As a high school teacher I would see this. Two guys fight, get it over with, and manage to get along. Two female students would get mad at each other and it wouldn't end, even after one or both were in cuffs. Herds of cows usually get one older cow, called the "boss cow" which will take the role of a bull in leading the herd.

Governor Palin may well be experimenting with a new paradigm, amassing political power without using a political party.

After all, she can now influence elections, and has developed a resource base devoted followers (to spread the message through alt media), as well as financial clout to be truly independent and hire policy wonks, media advisers and all the other staff needed to organize and run complex operations. No party machinery is needed here, and considering how the Republican party left her high and dry, probably not wanted either.

As a Canadian, I have a vital interest in American politics and the US economy, considering we are tied on like the Titanic's lifeboat. Perhaps Governor Palin is not the "best" choice as President, but from the Great White North, I'm not sure who would be the "best" choice.

"So you need a large population of hippies, and this case - dirty fucking hippies to truly thrive. They are supporting your whole way of life. God bless them."

Ha ha. No. I actually like hippies. They are NOTHING like the bitter boomer leftists. I play occasionally for real hippie audiences in Sonoma or Mendocino county. They are like children...very friendly and quite sweet.

But neither is a very large part of my audiences except in certain specific situations.

Well garage for a quitter she sure does manage to make a lot happen. From where I'm standing it looks she's accomplishing more, in a more original way, than just about anybody out there. She is so inside the establishment's OODA loop it's not funny. Well actually it is pretty funny watching liberal and rino heads explode.

PaulIf RINO John McCain didn't pick Sarah Palin for VP nobody would be talking about her. She made a lot of money off of dupes just like Britney Spears made a lot of money off dupes. More power to her.

Yeah and if Obama didn't illegally dig up dirt to smear the R senator whose seat he won we wouldn't be talking about him either. Life is a crazy set of happenstances.

Sarah's not duping anyone. That's her appeal. She is genuine, herself. Unlike your Clintons and Obamas pretending to be whatever they think people want to see. You are incapable of perceiving this because being a fundamentally dishonest political hack you project the same flaw on everyone else.

She's single-handedly changing the political landscape. And the rulebook. No quitter-grifter is capable of that.

He's going after the small business folks who file under Subchapter S (file their business and personal income together at personal rates) It was intended to allow small business to keep more of their net income to re-invest in their businesses.

That means the dry cleaner, coffee shop and pizza franchise in your neighborhood.

Increasing taxes on small businesses right now will be a major clusterfuck.

"p.s. I really, REALLY don't want [Lincoln] to be elected President and then continue to read about how 'stupid/dumb/ [he] sounds."

There. Fixed it for you.

And yeah, I'm thinking that a squeaky tenor with a hardcore backwoods Illinois accent and a deliberately folksy, jokey, anti-gravitas manner is exactly the right comparison to make. Though of course a great many of our other prominent statesmen and presidents also went for folksy, and you could use any of them as an example.